Item: Intercom
Rating: 9
Author: Jason Kelly

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Intercom in 2 ways, support and marketing. In our app we are entirely chat based and self help encouraged. We were struggling to easily communicate with users until recently, we moved Intercom into the app greatly reducing our response times during office hours. For the web version, it is mostly used for marketing and answering common questions. As we launch, this has been key to learning about our leads and tagging them to better notice trends to adjust for. We are now focused on building bots out and expanding our android article library.

Pros and Cons

Chat
Easy tagging and reporting
Easy team collaboration
Simple and fluid design
User friendly bot designer

Intercom Tickets need a serious revamp, the do not feel like a core feature but a complimenting one.
DESKTOP APP
Ability to have custom answers trigger other custom bots
Toggle for an internal note to keep a ticket closed

Return on Investment

More users self helping
Less wait times
More active communication from customers

Usability

We feel as though the main focus is support and we struggle to truly use this tool for sales/marketing effectively. We had a situation where we were misinformed on how outbound messages work causing a heavy bill for us which was unexpected. Instead of helping us and apologizing for not explaining how our plan worked, our account manager fumbled the ball and tried to upsell us instead of helping us resolve the issue. That has left a poor taste in the mouths of our leadership team making it hard to push for a better plan on our end.

Integrations

We use Stripe, Jira, and some custom API to help get data on customer devices, payments, and update any returns/cancellation requests in jira. We haven't taken full advantage of this at this time, we honestly aren't sure of where to even start.

Alternatives Considered

Drift, Freshdesk Contact Center and Zendesk Support Suite

Intercom sweeps the floor with Drift. Drift feel poorly made, less polished, and barely focused on customer support. Intercom is the exact opposite of this.

Freshdesk & Zendesk both offered a better experience for tickets in my opinion. Tickets on Intercom being mixed in with conversations is rough but havent no way to filter tickets from conversation in my assigned inbox is very bothersome and not user friendly. Tickets just feel extremely underdeveloped but it also seems to have so much potential if done right.

Key Insights

Do you think Intercom delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Intercom's feature set?

Yes

Did Intercom live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of Intercom go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Intercom again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Retool, Stripe, ShipFusion, FedEx Cross Border, Amplitude Analytics, Memfault, Slack

Likelihood to Recommend

I think Intercom is fantastic. It feels like the best parts of all the help desk apps i have used in the past. Working at drift, comparing Intercom to it, Intercom is significantly better from a support PoV. That being said, we are finding tickets to be too clunky for us to reliably use to support our customers. We need these flushed out more to encourage our teams to use them. Intercom has been fantastic for customer support communication and self help but a bit lack luster for our marketing style needs. We understand why it is this way but it does make it hard for us to push for the product (aka a better payment plan for more features)

Intercom's untouched potential..

Overall Satisfaction with Intercom